This is a summarization of a whole series of lectures we’ve been having together, and a survey, a finalization, of what you might call one motif of the symphony which will proceed again through the ensuing year. Because it’s the last lecture of that summarization, there are lectures, or talks, to follow. One of them, which concerns a reflection of this study today, will be on the purport of art and craft.
I have been giving you some oddities recently about how to cook things, and how to use the herbs. Here’s a little one about young cabbage. You know that the English are renowned for ruining cabbages, so I go to a Scandinavian recipe, which some of you may know. You take your cabbage, try not to wash it if you can help it; chop it up fine, placed in a braising pan either with drippings, or olive oil and butter, whichever you prefer to use. Cook the cabbage thus, without a lid, for a very brief time, turn it—chopped fine mark you. Put no condiments in at that stage. After a few minutes, you should add a required small quantity of either cream or fifty/fifty. And now you should place your condiments of whatever you use, salt and pepper—there’s no need to use herbs in this, you should not; salt, pepper, and of course I always recommend paprika, capsicum. When that has cooked, gently, for a little while, a very short time, add one-third—supposing you are cooking that dish for two people—of a freshly grated nutmeg, and don’t cook, merely stir in. It is a Scandinavian dish. Sounds very odd, and is most attractive. Far better than something that I had in Le Havre once that was raw spinach and peppercorns.
The subject then this morning concerns energies and elements. Cold air descends, hot air rises. We take the whole thing for granted, just like this garden, just like all the roses in bloom. “Oh, they’re in bloom.” And it’s all accepted, for nothing. That’s the way we’ve become: capricious. Here is one of the most astonishing and remarkable happenings, which is a mystery.
And you must understand that we only refer to now in this moment in the idiocy of verbosity, ‘hot air’ and ‘cold air’. What is it? We have talked about fresh water, fresh air, and with it, fresh food, fresh living and fresh thinking. It’s movement, of course. Non-static, revolutionibus.
Cold air collects in depressions and becomes stagnation and static. The effect at sunrise is a static. The effect if that same procedure has movement and is not static: the effect is stroking. The ordination of the leader, the sunlight at dawn, demanding its energy flowing, demanding the ego energy of the magnetic earth to come out and meet it. Demanding it to, and marrying, making what we call in verbosity ‘warmth’. We are around the whole of that subject again. And now we have got a lot more to look at, and to understand, of what actually happens, how and why.
Why does a bracken (Pteris) cover on a bed protect the plants? When there is a severe frost, those plants under the bracken are protected. “Oh, because there is bracken on them.” Rubbish. This isn’t so at all. And why bracken, and why not something else? Well, numerous things do, and numerous things don’t. The bracken has a uniqueness of receptivity; and what it actually does, is that at that period it holds in the warmth that is in the soil, and protects it from the cold, which is advancing from the descending air of cold from above, and prevents that marriage until the Sun comes.
The balance is concerning slopes and flats. The higher the temperature, the more rapid the chemical change—I use the word ‘chemical’, you understand what it means—in plant juices. To the degree that it is perfectly feasible to say—that indeed the director of Kew did state, one time—that every rise of ten degrees Fahrenheit doubled the change in the juices causing growth. Doubles every ten degrees. The lower the temperature, the less those changes are able to take place. The higher the temperature, they also cease to take place. But that in all cases, plant life, shrub life and tree life is more adaptable to high temperature rather than low. A vast living on the side of high than on low. When one talks about the chemical change, this is something we must now look at carefully. The effect of heat and freezing and normality upon plants also concerns moisture and dryth. The marriage of the four elements are combined in this matter, and cannot be separated.
The short light in what we call the spring, the dominance of Raphael, the short light, the angle also, is a constitution of leaf growth. But as the light, the marriage, increases in its energetic velocity, so does leaf growth cease, and blossom commence, and so intercede. In each of those cases within the plant, the juices are changing completely. In the early stage during the light, when it is shaded as you might say, shadowed, leaf growth takes place. I refer here to the woodlands where plants like nettles grow. Well, all of the plants which grow in woods have much more leaf than blossom, than those that grow in the shade. All of the plants in the valleys are much taller, with stems and foliage, than in the mountains, the same plants. And that in nearly all cases, the plants in the valley are more inclined to annual, and the plants in the mountains are more inclined to perennial. That in all cases, as you ascend, inclination of altitude, the foliage decreases and the blossom increases. So do the water juices of the foliage change also from the valley to the altitudinal rises. Those water juices are very much reduced even at three hundred foot altitude, and have already become the constituents of what you might call severe acidity or severe sugar.
These matters are completely interwoven, applicable, manageable, to change to climatic. They can manage cold and heat. The water juice cannot. This is somewhat difficult to handle, as you realize, and you must follow it as we go along. You will see that in the spring those water juices flow—it’s part of an inclination—that then they change with the Archangels’ changing, and they turn into something else.
I refer to this in seed again. You will realize that if you take a scarlet runner bean, in growth, it cannot take one degree of frost on any of that foliage at any time no matter what is happening with the foliage. In the spring, if that bean has come up, and there is freezing, that bean will surely be wiped out. If in the fall a slight frost begins to occur, gently, that scarlet runner bean will not be hit, but will survive for a period. On the contrary, the seed which is formed inside the pod, that pod will change its constitution completely, with Archangel Michael taking over, and will become hardened, completely, into waxes, glazes, and securities. And the seed itself will lose those moistures, within the cotyledon, and will turn to sugars and oils, leaving the moisture only at one- tenth. In other words, you have gone from plant, utmost metamorphosis, least idée, into least metamorphosis utmost idée. Now you have absolute jurisdiction over the four elements. They cannot touch it. They can hang there throughout the violence of Michael into Gabriel, and nothing can harm them. They’re protected.
Changes of juices: I’m trying to get us out of our illegitimate acceptance of verbosity, and find and perceive what is true, and what is truly happening.
One has now said that freezing can be handled by plants themselves. What will kill a plant when it is born will not kill a plant at another period. The administration of the cycles, of the change: all of this is most important that you try to marry it in your mind, for it is going to be the key to the whole of your techniques in the garden. Out of the attitudes of the opposites, then, out of the attitudes of the opposites, I refer to the young weak juice of spring, which can be destroyed by any ill-tempered element. It is delirious in its birth.
Now, perceive you, what I have just talked about, that I have said that that seed in the pod— mind you in the pod—that also the seed has cases that are pods. And all of these cases are cases. There is no what we call embryo. There isn’t any such thing. It floats through emanation from one into the other, visible into invisible.
But if you will look at that seed, that then is one-tenth moisture, to put a stupid statement, and the rest is oils and sugars and acute acids. That it cannot be touched by frost. But the moment that you apply moisture to it, it is absolutely adaptable to the least frost and will be destroyed instantly.
Now you understand why I spoke to you about soaking seed, how delicately this matter must be approached: where you soak seeds, and what the climatic is, and how the controls are going to be. For if that seed is to be soaked by the four elements in marriage combined, then there is an interweaving. But if you have taken one or two of the elements, and applied them to bring about an earlier procedure of awakening, you have got to make sure that the other mathematics of the elements are in line. And that is not very easy for human beings.
Out of the young, weak juice of the green shoot, delirious in growth, in birth, out of the center of that comes the necessity as the change of those four Archangels one from the other, handing the goblet, comes the necessity of utter hardness. For the elements are flame, and the consciousness is inside, and it strives at once to make what is called hard wood. Hardest of hard.
You see the same thing in your soil. The young tilth, the beautiful young tilth is delirious with growth. And the elements, capable of attack, and fear, inside—I use the word ‘fear’ for what it is—and out of that gentle and extortionate growth of the revolutionibus flowing in that beautiful tilth of open soil comes the requirement of seizure, to stop it, to prevent it. And the seizure takes place. It’s alive.
So out of the center of each quarter appears the next.
Then look at inclination and declination, and the two intermediaries of the two equinoxes, which are opposite each other, dawn and even-ing. It is there you will find the same thing.
Now in a glass house, where you place glass and put false heat, you don’t put false light. So you have got this matter, it is chiefly used during that period when the light of the Sun is at its lowest demand of the marriage. In other words, the energy is at its least. But you have increased one element: the warmth. And since the light is not, you have got a false ratio, and you have got a false growth. And if you add moisture as if the light were there, you will get Botrytis (grey mold).
This brings you to the focus of what is called climatic. Warm moist summer; cold dry winter. And the in-between twos: the equinoxes, the gentle equilibriums, the subtropics of Cancer and Capricorn.
A plant then becomes resistant to over-cold and over-heat by lessening its water content. I am using a term there, do you understand, I am talking about the wateriness of the young juice. By lessening that, and increasing the change into acidity or sugar or oil. Therefore you could very well say, normally, that the early spring is a water juice; the early summer, acid is beginning to flow into that water; that summer, the water now changes into the first stages of acidities and sugars; and in the fall, develops totally into acidities and sugars and oils, and exudes the waters. Not to be left.
Now, those changes that we are referring to in plants from the water juices to the sugars and acidities are an actual change, just as a leaf is a change to a flower, and a flower is a change to a seed. Now that change is a procedure. It does not in any degree comfortably go backwards. If the change has been induced by the Archangels’ law, the procedure must take place, and the following will happen. The moment that water juices are invited to flow, the procedure is flow, and you cannot stop it. This is where the positions of false climatics are malevolent, for they will destroy. The plants cannot go back on what they have done. The same with cold, and the worse with wind.
Frost, water, wind, heat: change of temperature, and also moisture, changes the juice structure flow, acid to sugar and vice versa. All frost procedure descending, lowering the vibrations, will be accentuated to the utmost and last degree by wind, adding destruction to destruction. That high acid and high sugar in a plant or a tree will avoid low freezing, but be fatal to severe freezing. Those juice changes then go with the inclination and the declination. They change easily in that procedure with it, but not against it. And not at all easy, to any form of reversal, backwards.
Now there are many plants, many shrubs, which are called half-hardy—and you understand what that word means, somewhat. Now those particular plants and shrubs, if planted in what you would call a light sandy soil, in good drainage, will ride a severe freezing, and even wind with it, whereas those same exact plants, if planted in a heavy soil, in a clay soil, or any soil with a bad drainage, they will inevitably succumb, at exactly the same climatics. Now you begin to see that we have not got a static matter concerning plants. It is all related.
Now it is time to look at this extraordinary matter, not of inclination of climatic, but incline and decline of the mountains having four sides, which interweave, that make them not four sides. You must begin to look at what takes place upon that angle, that in the dells, the pockets, you have what you must look upon as a stagnant collection that is going to refute marriage. That in all cases on incline and decline you have got non-static. For the colder it gets, the more it will descend, and the warmer it gets, the more it will rise. You have got movement all the time. That is what the French intensive bed is built upon.
I am going to go back to what I was talking about earlier, with the plants that grow in the valley having long stems and a lot of foliage, and not very much flower, and being largely annuals. And on mountainsides, on rises, slowly, as you go up in altitude, less and less foliage, and more blossom, and more seed and shorter; closer to the ground. This all points to certain matters.
Again, you begin on the low and you go out to the high and you go below both. You realize that all areas below sea level are obnoxious for growth, and all areas beyond a certain height of altitude are obnoxious for growth. Well that isn’t just plants. No, because waters from mountains from over a certain height are extremely bad for plants, and so for the animals. Now you begin to see this amalgamation of matters, at least I trust you do.
When we said less heat, why less heat? The point is, that those leaves, at those altitudes, because of the angling slope, because of the movement, do not need a vast period of the water juice. They very quickly turn to the acids and the sugars, and are complete. And they therefore, containing more acid and more sugar immediately, have the capacity to ride either severity of climate. That is a whole different view to imagine, that it does not freeze, or there is not cold, on escalating beds. It’s a capacity of plants in a different realm of growth; such as we are talking about spring and fall. And you have got a totally different plant of the same species at totally different altitudes.
Now you realize and know that there are varieties of different plants: what you call hardy, half-hardy, and tender. Those varieties are, because of that matter, according to their water juices thus to the elements. It is those that have less and less water juice that go into the hardies. And indeed you could go to certain mountains, such as you get in the Cape of South Africa, you go up those mountains and you find all the different varieties of lobelia, of lilies. All the different varieties growing at every different hundred feet that you go up. Covering two thousand five hundred feet. Nothing but stratas of different varieties of the families of the plants. Therefore, you must see that your structure in the plants on altitudes changes.
Now do you remember about livestock, and that your livestock should breed at certain altitudes, not in flat lands? Now do you understand? Do you see? It is not merely connected with the angle that the cow might be standing.
Here you also have some attitude to young, middle age, old in capacity. Remember that higher temperatures can be borne with more than low, and that cold descends and heat rises. Now you will understand that up to a certain point, the higher the altitude, the better the components. The lower, to the flat valley, the more danger.
Realize that there are waters, snow, glacial, that are beatific and malefic. One is inclined to think of all water as beatific. Very far from it.
Shade, evergreen, and deciduous, and the word ‘shelter’: quite different. Shade to all plants, and all animals and birds, and us, is obviously essential. What a mystery that there is, what we call in stupid words and take absolutely for granted, deciduous and evergreen trees. It is incredible that all the leaves suddenly fall off of a tree, and it has none. And the others sit there and are covered. Can you explain it? “Oh yes, of course, easy. It’s all in the laboratory.” It’s a complete mystery. And that mystery is part of the performance of the Archangels.
Therefore, with the discussion that we had about the roots of trees, and the performance of trees, you must look at the importance of using and operating in the farm and growing evergreen and deciduous, and the implementations. But much more important, you must look to the word ‘shelter’. And now, what did we say? Here is the most extraordinary matter that nobody looks at today in horticulture at all, or is talking about today at all! We are talking about shelter! What is the huge malefic appropriation of descending cold? It inevitably comes from a direction. And you know that if you have got a seething, biting cold wind that you are walking into, you turn around and go back and open up an umbrella in front of you. Or if you are on a bicycle you hurry up and turn around and go back the way you came from.
That is exactly what the whole articulate approach to using escalation is based largely upon. It is an enormous shelter, that does not face into the malefic. The malefic slides off of it, as a sloping. And just as you have that protection in the winter, for all of those crops of some delicacy— all the young vegetables and plants—so in the summer you have the malefic of the over-heat. The two periods are enormous in sleep: summer and winter. All the plants go to sleep in the Sun in the middle of the Sun, the day, noon. You’re going to look at that with nicotiana, and see what happens at noon. And even those that blossom in the daytime and sleep at night, they all are completely recumbent at noon.
Where you have over-cold, you face your south, during the over-cold. And where you have over-heat, you face your north. North, south, east and west; earth, fire, air and water; hot, cold, warm, wet. And so you use those slopes that are angled away from—again you do not face the abortive, the malefic. With the angle as you know how we discussed, it does not enter but is ricocheted off.
I want to describe here about the system of fruit tree. The more green wood, the less blossom; the less fruit. And remember we noted the principle—you can’t escape it now—shade in a wood produces green shoots, not hard wood. Green wood. You will never get within a wood, hard wood that you get outside, which remains green wood, and is full of green wood. And its appropriation is the water juice. All the fruit is connected to sugars. Therefore, the more shade: the more greenwood, the less hardwood, the less blossom. Now do you see the fallacy of orchards all blocked together? You have got the utmost shade. All within the trees, under the trees, and around the trees, and trees to each other, all shading each other. So you’ve got green wood, and not blossom and fruit.
The more light, the more demand. As the Sun demands, as the leader, the energy of the Earth to come out and marry it, so do we with each other and everything else, and so does fruit, and so do flowers, and so do foliages.
Therefore the more light, reduced during the less light period of less green wood, less green wood. But always in the spring the Archangels bring the greenwood. But with the more light capacity, not shady: the least green wood, the more hard wood, and therefore the more blossom and the more fruit.
If you will look at the system that we follow here, you will perceive that that is a following affair, fundamental. At the same time it must be noted that light and shade must be married. How interesting it is that in certain fairy stories and in certain myths suddenly a person has appeared without a shadow; now that is always a mystery beyond mystery, full of fear. How interesting that when a leaf falls off of a tree, it comes down and meets its shadow, and they both disappear. Oh yes, when looked at in words it means nothing.
Therefore you will see that such crops as rhubarb, asparagus do much better if during the over-heat period they are shaded, because they can take rather more cold than a lot of other plants. They should have during the summer some shade, therefore deciduous trees enter the scene. Also realize why we’ve blanched the endive and the celery. It’s the same reason. Because light will turn the juices into sugars and acidities. So the pulling up of the earth stops the light getting to it so that it remains delirious. It does not go into the structure that it wants to, in order to hold the great stem that is going to hold the very blossom like a timber tree.
Now we can look more at these escalating beds with their walls, with their drainage, with the interplay of revolutionibus, with perpetual movement in line with the whole revolutionibus. You will see that you have entered a sea of culture. And this is why we grow plants in pots. A pot is a little escalating bed. It’s raised. It has beautiful drainage, and the revolutionibus can enter through the pot to all the little roots. Just that much. Sometimes it enters too much. That is if the climatic supports. And you have to use something else about the pot.
You must know the principle of growing strawberries in barrels. These are indeed tubular raised beds. You simply bore holes in the barrel, and you plant the strawberries all in the sides.
And since a strawberry is an acute Alpine, it very much responds, it says, “O that’s wonderful! I’m nearly home again.”
You can say, “Oh yes, we understand that perfectly.” But you can’t understand it.
You realize that when growing grapes, get a cold house, and you always put the roots outside. All these things implement the same thing. What are we talking about? Acutely, alchemistically, we are talking about, in escalating beds, raising the vibration. And to a certain degree, in flat hollows, you are lowering the vibrations. Now when we say raising and lowering we are also pointing to those two appropriations to the four Archangels, the ahrimanic and the luciferic. So the more you sit in the dell, with the cold air descending, the more you are approaching the influences of the ahrimanic. The more that you are approaching towards the stars, you are of course, in raising the vibrations, approaching the luciferic. And we have said, have we not, that all plants and trees can tolerate the luciferic more than the ahrimanic, by saying, ‘heat more than cold’.
Regarding livestock: the balanced diet of livestock is a disease of man’s mind. The balanced performance of the manipulation of soil is a disease of man’s mind. “Within the infant rind of this small flower, poison hath residence, and medicine, power.” (Romeo and Juliet.) You can’t have one without the other. The idea of wiping out the insects, the birds, the slugs, the dry, the cold, the heat, of wiping it out, can only create fear within us. It cannot create anything else. In the procedure with livestock, it is compliant today that the balance of the diet is worked out as necessitous to the animal. It must be perceived, now that you have discovered and studied your herbs and plants, that the animal, like the plant, like the area, comes under the constitution of the revolutionibus, which is perpetual change. At no time is the diet of any animal exactly alike, and at the different periods of the four seasons, the changes are enormous. We can hardly take these things into account, and certainly we cannot measure them. And the thinking that we can, is full of dis-ease.
If livestock is not granted its authority of palate, it must instantly become pregnant to disease, by not being self-reflective to the law of life through its palate and through its senses.
I bring up again the ancient Russian story of the bashilik1. Here was an emperor and a princess and a prince. The prince falls in love with the princess, and the emperor agrees that they should be married. And very suitable they are. When the prince has married the princess, and he is living in the emperor’s palace, the emperor and the princess have to go on this journey. And as always in these narratives, they give to the prince—the princesses’ husband—the hundred keys of the hundred rooms. Ninety-nine you may, one you may not. But the hundredth key is there. And the prince agreed to yes, and to no, that he would, and would not use the hundredth.
And away the emperor and the princess went. The prince went through the ninety-nine rooms day after day, in ecstasy, growing more and more with the enormous smile of Uriel, was overcome by it, was overwrought, and could not resist the disobedience of the one hundredth. And when he had unlocked the door of the one hundredth, there in the middle of this great room of stone, was encircled in all the bands of the metals of the world: bashilik, this incredible being of the utmost of dragon in human form. And chained with every metal and chain existing in the world to the center of the room.
And when bashilik perceived the prince, he motioned from the fountain for water. And the prince was overcome with bashilik, and could not form his own views at all, in any way whatever.
And went to the fountain and brought the cup of water. And bashilik drank, and ordered a repetition, and drank, and ordered a repetition and: every chain was broken, every band was gone, and Bashilik had wings and flew out of the door, seizing the princess who had now returned with the emperor and vanished over the mountains.
A huge bunch of laws there so I won’t discuss it. But remember the one hundred keys were on the ring. And out of the greatest fortune—closest of all, hand to glove—came the greatest misfortune.
Of course the prince as you would realize later, goes out into the world, and since he was kind and generous to Nature, had received gifts of a feather, a fish’s scale, an ant’s fiddle and numerous matters, which when he required them to chase bashilik, they all came and joined the battle, and eventually…
How much is all always taken for granted? We look at all the roses come into bloom, and we say. “Ah, at last! There they are, about time too! They are beautiful aren’t they, yes wonderful, well let’s have some celery. Oh, there are the strawberries, they’re arrived, they’re blooming all aren’t they?” And everything is that.
Always rebirth, every dawn everything is new. No strawberry ever tastes the same. Not that strawberry with that flavor, ever is that flavor of that strawberry the same. Everything is new.
Only some of the contagions of mechanization could be said in any way to be static at all. We rely on that static, until we press the start of the car and it doesn’t work. Never anticipate. Never expect. Never know that the next season is going to be the season because it won’t be a season, it isn’t. It’s something you’ve never known. Something none of us have ever known. Every seed comes out. We’ve never known it, we’ve never known it before. It’s all utterly, utterly new. Our whole approach to life must be this.
Believe in spring; believe in summer, but do not know. For that knowing is an anchoring that is not true. It is connected with verbosity.
The reflections in Nature are never static, never the same repeat. Only our words. Further to that, added to it, Nature is total. All of us have a pre-sentiment that we think of insects, birds, fish, plants and trees. “Oh yes, yes. That’s all a part of Nature. Now we must get on with life.” You see, you can say what you like, there’s an abyss there, a tremendous abyss of enormous depth that you can’t really see the bottom of now. And that the whole performance of human beings is a destiny the same as birds, the same as the bees, the same as the plants, and this is what Pliny and Dioscorides were saying when they said the plants contain something in their life which is inexplicable to us. They cannot show us the human root. But in showing us their obedience to the root, in some way leads us to discover our own, in common.
All the roots of every living thing, all roots, growing, are beneath us, are one focus energy, one radii, all like radii of reflection out of the One. It is pre-eminent that we arrive at this, that we become absolutely compliant with the obedience, the reverence, the destiny that we are, being born. For what miraculous things go with creation and reflection! What miraculous things take place in that beautiful garden among the beautiful plants and the trees!
And now when one states that, do you perceive how now this shines out of all humanity through each individual as a reflective entity? It is only through each individual that the new birth of man’s garden, connected with Nature, and that to a degree unknown in the future, it is only through the individual that the miracle of seed takes place through the miracle of man—a man, a person, a woman, a child. It is that child, that woman, that man, living in a garden that becomes the consummation of a reflective marriage, that is spiritual, that produces the ordinance of seeds
in plants. And these are new angels, and they are a beatification. This matter that I am referring to has never come about by a mass approach. It’s never come about through a laboratory. It’s in to out; not out to in. Can only come about through the destiny marriage of an individual in the garden with Nature.
As one spoke about in the glass house, the reduction of light being the reduction of energy, you had weak plants. Weak plants out of balance that were prone to insects; insects have to eat a lot more of false juice, of weak juice. That is why pests have come about, because as you know in the agriculture of today, with the false juices in the plants as a result of artificial fertilizers, they’re full of weak juice, and all the poor insects have to eat fifty and a hundred times more. Just as the wretched child in the city, goes on eating white bread all day, and has no sustenance at all, but only constipation.
This is the creation of pest. If you look at plants like that, and what you call the diseases of pest, which is unbalanced, we must look at us. That if we have, and do, live in an unbalance, we have a weakness. And that if we don’t live in the day and sleep in the night, and if we do not observe and comprehend the dawn, and the evening, we are broke, we are not righting. This is a destiny, and our comprehension of living in, with, summer and winter and the two equinoxes becomes a participation that we are living with the four Archangels, marrying the procedure, and we become reflective to the leaderships. And our energies come out and meet those leaderships and are married.
Do you want to talk about it?
Q: Alan, you once mentioned that you had germinated seeds from Tutankhamen’s tomb, and you germinated them. Do you think you could talk about that?
Well, of course. It was done through Wisley. How it was done? Ordinary propagative methods through an intensity of controls. Inside controls, following the whole formation of the seed. To a last degree, of refuting argument of the elements. And they germinated…I’ve forgotten all of the details…it’s very interesting, except it was also uninteresting, of course, because the seed was modified, and had to be cracked from the mummification. And, as far as I can remember, it was seventy percent that germinated, but of course the ancientness of the procedure in the plant had become so ancient, that as a plant it couldn’t grow. They did rot, some of the seedlings, but they also didn’t grow, because they all turned out to be other than they expected, it was a lotus that was no longer known. Merely a matter more in interest than any sense.
Have you come to an understanding now about the enormous danger of wind? Concerning freezing and concerning moistures? You see now why I am always so on my toes about when there is wind in the orchard. That the wind, more than the cold, removes the liquid juices out of a plant, takes away the vitalities, and takes away the virtuous juices and blows them out. Therefore if that plant is positioned where there is wind, not to open its pores with moisture—in other words to be dry—the wind will have less of this advantage. If you apply water when there is wind, the pores will open and the wind will take all the insides of the plant and remove them to another area altogether.
It goes further than that of course, because then the wind, having removed those juices, those juices cannot turn into the sugars and acids which they will need for future occasions. They are delinquent. It becomes a mathematical conglomeration, more and more. Do you follow?
Likewise when there is wind with freezing, the whole of the freezing is trebled to what the freezing alone is. As I have said, upon dry soil, sandy soil with excellent drainage, a plant of that same nature will survive, where in a heavy wet soil—the same temperature, the same climatic—will destroy the plant utterly, and does.
What one is very gently saying here is that there are no extremities whatever that the entry of man and his destiny can bring about regarding protections and controls and changes. It shows you that nothing is a fixation. That in truth, it would seem to be believed—believable—that the whole visible Nature, to us, is a reflection of our behaviors, and our living. That includes their capacity, of course, of resurrection and forgiveness which the whole plant world, as you already perceive, is packed with. You have to put all those together and marry.
Now here is another matter which is interesting. And it’s one which is highly questioned— even here I’ve heard it questioned. If you grow a half-hardy plant, in only a hardy area—that means unsuitable, you understand?—and you manage to achieve it within the more genial climatic period, you take the seed, you have not changed the constitution of the issue of those plants to any other plants taken from any other area, as regards that capacity of dealing with the element. Do you understand what I am saying? That is a whole key that needs to be looked at. It means that there’s nothing static. Do you follow?
This does not mean that you cannot bring about a change, but it does mean that the change as Bach (of Dr. Bach’s Flower Remedies) says is not to cure an illness or a disease but to cure the person. Do you follow? So it is not the plant that you change—which is what they are all trying to do today—but the relationships.
How fascinating it is that in all the variety of plants, they all have these capacities of managing here and not managing there.
You realize that in the whole procedure of crab apples, there’s very little season. They’re all just crab apples. They all happen in August. The moment that man’s image came in, we had a different apple, not a little round green one, but a long red one, married with the Malus sylvatica. And out of that there was an idée, well that’s enormous. “I would love one in January.” “What did you say? You shall have three wishes because you’re good. What are they?” “Oh! An apple in January!” Abracadabra! Born, just like the motorcar, just like the expressway, just like the office, just like social security. And so are gardens.
Out of the whole of that are tinned strawberries, and chrysanthemums all year ‘round, and frozen peas. I spoke of birth, everything fresh, never anticipated, always exceptional, new. The whole thing in the concept of the reflection of the human is born. They eat tin strawberries all the year. They have no desire, when the beauty of the Archangel says, “Perceive!” They don’t perceive and they don’t want. And they go on stuffing themselves with tin strawberries, until they have an apoplectic fit.
The seasons and the compliance of the obedience to the law of the rotations, produces early potatoes—those potatoes in that frame are now ready; they will be the most delicious potatoes. You can’t have any! That the potatoes then come in the middle season, they come in the late season. Now the late ones you can store—if you try to store these new potatoes we are going to raise, well you wouldn’t have a chance of course, but they wouldn’t be protected, they would go rubbery in two weeks. But the old, the big potatoes—you see how full of words we are—what we are talking about is the Archangels; they have blessed this matter. Do you follow? Now do you see what we are talking about?
There are apples you can put in the store, and you must pick them at a certain time. You mustn’t pick them when you decide you will. It won’t work. Do you follow? And you must put certain herbs with them, not what you think you will, “Oh I like this. It smells nice.” Won’t work.
Archive ID: CA1089
Type: Audio
Title: Energies and Elements
Date: 23 May 1977
Location: Covelo Village Garden, Covelo, CA
